Falcon Heavy Post-Launch Press Conference 6 février 2018 Musk répond aux questions de la presse juste après le premier vol d'essai du Falcon Heavy de SpaceX, évoquant la charge utile Tesla Roadster et les propulseurs réutilisables.
Musk répond aux questions de la presse juste après le premier vol d'essai du Falcon Heavy de SpaceX, évoquant la charge utile Tesla Roadster et les propulseurs réutilisables.
Transcription John Taylor (SpaceX)
Everyone in the room. We're going to be starting momentarily. I'd ask that if you have a mobile phone you put it on silent or vibrate. We're going to get Elon seated and once he's seated the show begins with a short video. Okay. And then I'm going to introduce him. He's going to make some open remarks and then we'll take questions in the room and then I'm going to bounce to questions on I'm going to try to do groups of three, three people in the room, three people on the phone and we've got 30 minutes but if the questions are good which I'm sure they will be it may be I'm going to but thank you all for your patience today and throughout this campaign.
Elon Musk
It's. It's that. It's.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
Good evening and welcome to the post launch news conference for the SpaceX Falcon Heavy test flight. I'm John Taylor, director of communications for space. Joining us to provide a status on mission Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO and lead designer.
Elon Musk
Elon hi R. So yeah really excited about today. Incredibly part of the SpaceX team done an incredible job of creating what they believe the most advanced rock in the world and biggest rock in the world. I'm still going to talk everything that happened because it seems surreal to me. You had this image of just giant explosions on time with you know that wheel bouncing down the road has a logo landing somewhere. But fortunately that's not what happened. The commission really as well as one of the that you guys okay. Still the line that was epic. That's probably the most exciting thing I've ever seen literally ever. And then we prepared for obviously deadline uncrown people were showing that and we're going to get these limits at rapid it didn't have enough propellant to relink the engine Sorry Enough for simple T to try out the aluminum trample boron that's used to light the engines. So it the center one lit I believe and the outer two did not and that was not enough to slow the pace down apparently it hit the water of 300 miles an hour and took out two of the engines on the ground. So after we got the footage like myself that's some pretty fun footage. So if the cameras didn't get blown up as well then we'll put that out for you know we're but that that's going to be we weren't going to reuse the set that center for anyway or the two side views the Side viewses will figure out some place to put them. But since they're not block client version client who are planning on reusing of course the upper stage seems to have worked perfectly so far. The tubes were executed correctly and they will see if the upper stage avionics survive quite an arduous trip through the Van Allen belts. Normally the stage will pass very quickly through the Van Allen belts here it's essentially well in there for several hours and then it's going to do a
Elon Musk
complete its propellant and go to trans velocid ejection. And the propellant levels all look good. Propellant. At the second run of the upper stage we were only 0.3-sigma away from prediction which is basically very minor. So it has plenty of propellant to complete the transpos rejection. Assuming that the fuel doesn't freeze and the oxygen doesn't propell and the electronics don't get bright. We'll find out in a few hours if that boat is successful. I don't think there's anything else I know that's worth mentioning. I went out to the landing zone, took a look at the side boosters. They look in really good condition so they're both reflyable although as I said they're combination of version three and version four. So we're only going to be re flying really version 5 at this point that launches shortly and that'll be our mainstay. We'll stick to version five for the Falcon architecture. We don't expect to have a version 6. All right, any questions that I haven't answered? I'll do my best to answer them but not sure if I have the information yet but I'll try.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
So we're going to start in the room and the first question goes to
Reporter
David Curley from ABC News Elon Spectacular. What did you learn? What did Falcon Heavy teach you?
Elon Musk
Teachers I guess told me like crazy things can come true because I he'd say like I didn't really think this would work. When I see the rocket lift off I see like a thousand things that could not work and it's amazing when they do. And I was really seeing the two boosters land synchronized really just like the simulation. I mean it makes me think like really that could be quite a scalable approach. You know you could imagine large numbers of those just coming in, landing, taking off, landing, doing many flights per day. So I think gives me a lot of faith for our next architecture. The sort of the interplanetary spaceship. We have different names for it but BFR is kind of a code name, and it gives me confidence that BFR is really quite workable. I was actually looking at the side boosters and, like, they're pretty big, you know, 16 stories tall, 60 foot leg span, but really we need to be way bigger than that. So I think it's given me a lot of confidence that we can make the BFR design work. Yeah, it's. I have tremendous confidence, obviously, in the SpaceX team. So I think we can really do this a lot and keep advancing the technology to achieve full and rapid reusability, which would have a profound effect on the future. And one of the interesting things about, say, Falcon Heavy versus Falcon 9 is that Falcon Heavy has the same level of expandability as Falcon 9. So if you look at, say, the price of Falcon 9 is $60 million, Falcon Heavy is 90, even though it's got three times as much capability. Because in both cases, the only thing that's expended is the upper stage. We're going to start recovering the fairings, the big nose cone. We're going to recover that, recover the boosters. And so there's really the cost difference, really, between a Falcon nine and Falcon Heavy is minor.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
The next question from Marcia Dunn at Associated Press.
Reporter
MARCIA dunn, AP what were your. What was going through your mind? How, how amazed were you to see your roadster up there with Starman just cruising along with the blue planet? And how long will we be getting live views, do you think, from the car?
Elon Musk
Well, I think it looks so ridiculous and impossible, and you can tell it's real because it looks so fake. Honestly, we'd have way better CGI if it was fake. And, you know, the colors all look kind of weird in space. There's no atmospheric occlusion, you know, like, everything looks too crisp and. But we know we didn't really test any of those materials for, you know, is it small space hardened or whatever, you know, so it just has the same seats that like a normal car has. It's just literally a normal car in space, which I kind of like the absurdity of that. And if you look closely, there's on the dashboard, there's a tiny roadster with a tiny spaceman. So Hot Wheels made a Hot Wheels roadster, and a friend of mine suggested, hey, why don't you put that Hot Wheels roadster with a tiny spaceman on the car too? Like, that'd be cool. Sure. So we did that. I mean, it's kind of silly and fun, but I think that's, you know, silly fun. Things are important and normally for a new rocket, you know, they'd launch like a block of concrete or something like that. I mean, that's so boring. And I think that's just the imagery of it is something that's going to get people excited around the world. And it's still tripping me out. I mean, I'm tripping balls here.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
Next question. In the room, how about Brendan Byrne from wmfe, the NPR facility in Orlando?
Reporter
Yeah, Congratulations, Elon. Great launch today. Where do you see the Falcon Heavy fitting into this launch industry? Is this something that is going to be for more national security? You see this for interplanetary missions. What's the future of Falcon Heavy?
Elon Musk
Yeah, the great thing is Falcon Heavy opens up a new class of payload so it can launch more than twice as much payload as any other rocket in the world. So it's kind of up to customers what they might want to launch. But it can launch things direct to Pluto and beyond, you know, no stop needed. They don't even need like a gravity assist or anything. And launch giant satellites. It can do anything you want. You go back, you could send people back to the moon with a bunch of, you know, if you did a bunch of launches of Falcon Heavy and did an orbital refilling, the two or three Falcon heavies, you know, what do you call the payload of a Saturn V? But I wouldn't recommend doing that because I think the new architecture, BFR architecture is the way to go. But I think it's going to open up a sense of possibility. I think it's going to encourage other companies and countries to say, hey, if SpaceX, which is a commercial company, can do this and nobody paid for Falcon Heavy, just paid for it with internal funds, then they could do it too. So I think it's going to encourage other countries and companies to raise their sights and say, hey, we can do bigger and better, which is great. We want a new space race. Races are exciting.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
How about one more in the room? How about Darryl Neal from the Fox affiliate here in Orlando? Mr. Mus, kind of talk us through your thought process. As you were watching the launch, you said you were incredibly concerned about it, just wanted to clear the pad because it kind of. I set expectations low. So talk me through. As you were watching it, Yeah, I
Elon Musk
think this was true of anyone who's involved in closing the design of something, you know, all the ways that can fail and that's like the sort of mental checklist that's scrolling through your mind is all the things that can Break. I mean, there's thousands of things that can go wrong and everything has to go right. Once the rocket lifts off, there's no opportunity to do a recall or upload a software fix or anything like that. It's like you see the passing degrees, 100%, at least for the ascent phase. And I've seen rockets blow up so many different ways, so, you know, it's a big relief when it actually works.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
One more question on the rim.
Elon Musk
I bet the first, you know, when they first, whoever it is like, whoever's like, you know, when they're like first launched, like a 747 or DC3 or something like that, I bet the chief engineer was like, I can't believe that thing's flying.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
One more in the room and then we'll go to the phone. How about Irene Klotz from Aviation Week? Irene, we need to have you on mic first for the folks on the phone to hear.
Reporter
Okay, thanks. Irene Klotz with Aviation Week. Congratulations. The. Can you talk to us a little bit about what needs to happen to certify Falcon Heavy for the national security missions, how far along you are in that process and how many flights you might need to do. And also if you're able to say anything about how much your SpaceX's investment to get to the rocket to this point, thanks.
Elon Musk
I think we only need, I think it depends on which national security mission that we need to, you know, how many flights depends on which mission. But we have a number of commercial customers for Falcon Heavy, so I think, I really don't think it's going to be in any way an impediment to acceptance of national security missions. We'll be doing several Falcon Heavy missions flights per year. So let's say if there's a big national security satellite that's due for launch in three or four years, we probably have like a dozen or more launches done by then. So it won't really, I don't think there'll be a launch number that's, that's an inhibitor on national security stuff. And. Yeah, so. And then we've got the STP mission that's coming up, which is another test mission that'll go on where everything's on block 5, version 5 of the Rocket, and then we'll be launching version 5, 4 block 5, single stick in a couple, couple months. So I think it's hopefully smooth sailing for qualification for national security missions. Our investment to date, probably a lot more than I'd like to admit,
Elon Musk
know, we try to cancel the Falcon Heavy program three times at SpaceX because it's like, man, this is way harder than we thought. His initial idea was just like, oh, you know, you stick on two first stages of side boosters. How hard can it be? It's like, way hard. We have to redesign the center core completely. We have to redesign the grid fins because it's a long story, but if you've got a nose cone on the end of, at the end of the booster instead of a cylinder, you lose control authority. Because if you've got a cylinder, you can kind of bounce the air off of the rocket and you get like 30% or more increased control authority if you've got a cylindrical section instead of an ogive section at the end of the booster. So we had to redesign the grid fins, redesign the control system, massively redesign the thrust structure at the base to take way more load. That center booster has got to deal with over a million pounds of load coming in combined from the side boosters, so it ends up being heavier. So the center core is basically a complete redesign. And even the side boosters, there's a pretty large number of parts that change, and then the launch site itself needs to change a lot. I'm guessing our total investment is over half a billion, probably more.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
I'd like to take some questions from the phone. I think the first one up is Dan Vergano from BuzzFeed News.
Reporter
Is that right? That's right. Dan Vergano, BuzzFeed News. Could you talk a little bit about the decision to have the two side cores come down at the same time? Is that just the way it falls out from the physics, or was that an actual decision you made?
Elon Musk
We did offset them slightly, but really they pretty much just come down. There's no. We wanted them to offset slightly, just so that the radars didn't interfere. And we actually wanted no communication between the two stages. They're both going to point in absolute space, and we're just worried that the radar reflection of one would be seen by the radar receiver of the other. But, no, that's just kind of how it happened. It's actually meant to happen just like that.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
The next question on the phone comes from Keith Cowing in NASA Watch.
Reporter
First of all, congratulations. You've launched a rather unconventional payload into space, one that's generated a lot of buzz. And there's a lot of people, some of them citizen scientists, some of them, they're just newbies when it comes to tracking things in space, are going to try and Track the Tesla and understand what's happening to it. You know, like that movie, dude, Where's My Car? And other than the live webcam Today, what is SpaceX going to do to interact with this community of Tesla trackers once the car leaves orbit? Do you have a plan or are you just going to kind of wait and see what bubbles up on the Internet and react to it?
Elon Musk
We don't have a plan. No plan. The battery is going to last about 12 hours from launch, roughly, and after that it's just going to be out there in deep space for maybe millions or billions of years, who knows? And yeah, maybe discovered by some future alien race, thinking, what the heck? What were these guys doing? Did they worship this car? Why do they have a little car in the car? That really confused them. So not sure what's going to happen, but I think, you know, it's kind of a fun thing and I sure hope that next burn works, by the way. Yeah, we'll know in a few hours.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
Now we're going to go back to the room, if that's okay. So how about Chris Davenport from the Washington Post? If Chris, you could wait until we get you, Mike.
Reporter
Thanks. So now that you're focusing more on the bfr, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the timeline. I know you said it's coming along faster and then what that means for your plans for Mars and the moon.
Elon Musk
Well, I don't want to get too off topic, but, you know, I think we might, if we get lucky, we'll be able to do short hopper flights with the, the spaceship part of bfr. Maybe next year.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
All right, one more in the room. Let's see who's. How about Bill Harwood from cbs? Thanks.
Elon Musk
BILL Harwood, CBS Elon, residual Sigma, which is like the key. It's a decently long burn, though, maybe a minute or so. And yeah, that'll be in a few hours, hopefully. I actually don't have the latest telemetry from, because I was just out of. Actually out of the landing zone and haven't been back to launch control since going to landing zone. So I don't have the latest information on the status of the upper stage.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
Tom Costello from NBC News, please, please. Right here on the front row, blue jacket.
Reporter
Well, congratulations again. I wanted to follow up on Chris's question because Chris asked you, what's your timeline potentially to go to the moon or Mars? And you said, did you say as soon as next year? Can you quantify that? Then I had my real question.
Elon Musk
I'm just doing Chris's work. Yeah. Well, the by Hopper tests, I mean, kind of like we have the grasshopper program for Falcon 9 where we just add the rocket, take off and land in Texas at our Texas test site. So that would be. We'll either do that at our South Texas launch site near Brownsville or do ship to ship. We're not sure yet whether ship to ship or Brownsville, but most likely it's going to happen at our Brownsville location because we got a lot of land with nobody around. So if it blows up, it's cool. But by hover test, I mean it'll, you know, go up, you know, several miles and then come down. The ship will. The ship is capable of single stage to orbit if you fully load the tanks. So we'll do flights of increasing complexity. We want to test the heat shield material, something like, you know, fly out, turn around, accelerate back real hard and come in hot to test the heat shield. Because we want to have highly reusable heat shield that's capable of absorbing the heat from interplanetary entry velocities. So it's really tricky.
Reporter
Potential, the potential to go to Moon or Mars. What's your timeline there?
Elon Musk
So there are a lot of uncertainties on this program, but it is going to be our focus after now we're almost done with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. We're going to level off, as I said, at block 5 or version 5, so there won't be any more major versions of Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy. Dragon is also going to level off at Dragon version 2. There might be like point releases, you know, 5.1 or Dragon 2.1 or something like that. But most of our engineering resources will be dedicated to vfr and so I think that will make things go quite quickly. The ship part is by far the hardest because that's going to come in from super orbital velocities like Mars transfer velocities, Moon transfer velocities. These are way harder than coming in from Earth orbit. There are some of the heating things that scale to the eighth power, which I didn't realize there's anything that scales to eighth power. But turns out reentry, certain elements of reentry heating scale up at the 8th to the 8th. So just yet, testing that ship out is the real tricky part. The booster, I think I don't want to get, you know, complacent, but I think we understand reusable boosters, reusable spaceships that can land propulsively, that's harder. So we're starting with the hard part first. I don't know. I think it's conceivable that we do our first test flight in three or four years of a, you know, full up orbital test flight, including the booster. Oh no, it go to low Earth orbit first, but it would be capable of going to the moon shortly thereafter. It's designed to do that.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
Elon, we want to be sensitive to your time. How many more questions you want to take or how much time?
Elon Musk
A couple of two more questions.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
Okay, sure. There is a gentleman who came from our Reddit community that I want to definitely call on and I don't know your Reddit handle and I don't want to say your name so you can introduce yourself with your name or your handle.
Reporter
Hi Elon, my name is Martin Avignon and I'm with Reddit's rspacex community. I'd like to congratulate you as well as so many people have done just now. I'd like to know about Starman's spacesuit. Is it a production model, is it instrumented and, or pressurized? And what's holding his, what's holding him up?
Elon Musk
Well, there's a mannequin inside, so it's just basically stuffed. But yeah, that is the actual production design. So the real one looks like just like that. In fact, that's one of the qualification articles. That's the real deal. Yeah, I figure if you're going to go to, I mean, it's dangerous. This is a dangerous trip. You want to look good. It took us three years to design that spacesuit. It was real hard. It's easy to make a spacesuit that looks good but doesn't work or that works but doesn't look good. It's really difficult to make a spacesuit that looks good and works and you have to make it a multi part process. And it was surprisingly difficult. Very difficult.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
How about Dave Muscher from Business Insider.
Reporter
Hi, Dave Melcher from Business Insider. Thank you so much for doing this.
Reporter
I want to go back to BFR for a second since you were talking about that and also Starman, which is such an inspirational thing that's happening. Have you thought, given any thought to what you might do with BFR in that way? What is the payload and any thoughts to that?
Elon Musk
No, no idea. Suggestions are welcome. I mean, it's a beast. So you know the VFR, 9 meter diameter, 30ft roughly diameter, which is. Yeah, you can put a lot in. 30ft diameter, 110, 120 meters long. Yeah. Big. Although, you know, I bet it doesn't look that big after a while. All right, maybe a couple more. Yeah, sure. One more.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
How about Tim Fernholz from Quartz on the back of the white shirt?
Reporter
Hi Elon, thanks again for doing this. Two questions for you. One, just about fairing recovery. Just curious how SpaceX is coming with that. And two, Jeff Bezos just responded to your tweet congratulating you on your launch today. You just mentioned a minute ago that we need a new space race. I'm just curious if you see yourself in a race with Blue Origin,
Elon Musk
what was the first part of the question?
Reporter
Checking in on fairing recovery.
Elon Musk
Yeah, so the fairing recovery has proven surprisingly difficult, I think. I'm pretty sure we'll serve fairing recovery in the next six months. But it turns out like you pop the parachute in the fairing, you've got this giant awkward thing, it tends to interfere with the airflow on the parachute and gets all twisty and obviously it was a low priority too. Also we have fairing version 2, which is the really that's the important one that we want to recover. So even if we recovered fairing version one, that that wouldn't be, we wouldn't be re flying it in the future. So fairing two and recovery, that's very important. And my guess is next six months we figure out fairing recovery and we've got a special boat to catch the fairing. It's like a catcher's mitt. It's like a giant captures Mittenburg form. It's going to run around and catch the fairing. Actually it's kind of fun. I think we might be able to do the same thing with Dragon. So unless if NASA wants us to, we could try to capture Dragon. Literally meant for the fairing, but it would work on Dragon too.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
In the room. How about James Dean from Florida today?
Reporter
Thanks so much, Elon. James, Florida today, Speaking of those dragons, could you give us a status on commercial crew and you know when we might realistically see an astronaut? Just get into low Earth orbit, much less the moon or Mars.
Elon Musk
Yeah, you know we're making great progress on crew Dragon or Dragon version two. That's. Yeah. Actually in terms of company priorities, the obviously mission assurance is always number one as a priority. But then number the priority used to be Falcon 9 block 5 and then a month ago I said absolute priority is crew dragging. So we're pretty much done with Falcon 9 block 5 or version 5, pretty much almost done with Falcon Heavy few tweaks that would occur with Falcon Heavy Block 5, but they're minor and so it's all hands on deck for crew Dragon and our goal is to. We're aspiring to fly crew to orbit at the end of this year. That's our goal. I think that's. I think the hardware will be ready.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
We have time for one more question in the room and I was just
Elon Musk
looking at Falcon 9. It's like, yeah, kind of small,
John Taylor (SpaceX)
so we're going to have to wrap it and I'd like for Chris Gephardt please to have the last question.
Reporter
Question, in terms of the next Falcon Heavy, which is that Arabsat or the one for the Air Force, do you have any idea of how pad A held up from today's launch and how quickly can it be changed?
Reporter
And so yes, and I guess my questions are how quickly can the pad be reconfigured between heavy and Falcon 9? Since you need that pad for both
Elon Musk
real fast, it's no problem going back and forth. It's designed that way.
Reporter
And for the Block 5 version of the Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy are the. Does the Falcon Heavy need a dedicated core built for it or the block it does.
Elon Musk
Ok. The center core needs to be dedicated. Yeah. So that's. The center core is a special build. The side boosters, we can reuse existing Falcon 9s, but we need to just replace the interstage with a, with a nose cone. And it needs to use the upgraded titanium grid fins which are sweet. Those worked out real well. I'm really happy about those. In fact, I'm glad we got the side boosters back because they had the titanium grid fins and the center core didn't. So if I was to pick anyone, I would have picked the side boosters. I'd pick the center core to explode. So that would be like the least. Yeah, those friggin grid fins are super expensive and awesome, but the production rate on them is slow. We need them back. That was the most important thing to recover were those grid fins.
Reporter
Are your sensors inside the spacesuit testing its ability to function? Nope, it's just up there.
Elon Musk
Yeah, no, it definitely works though. You can just jump in a vacuum chamber with it and it's fine.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
Elon, thank you.
Elon Musk
All right, thank you.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
Thank you so very much for your time.
Elon Musk
I really appreciate it. Thanks everyone for. I've had a good time. Lots more excitement coming. As well. Then we'll put that out for real. But that's the idea. We weren't going to reuse the set. That's Er anyway or the two side pieces. The sidebases will figure out something to put them but since they're not block 5 or version 5 we were planning on reusing any of the force. The upper stations have worked perfectly so far. The two bones were executed correctly and they will see if the upper stage emul survived quite larger strip through the Van Allen belts. Normally a SAGE will pass very quickly through the Van Allen belts. Here it's essentially one force force their and then it's going to do a
Elon Musk
deplete its propellant and go to transmonstant ejection. And the propellant levels all look good. Propellant is fastest. At the second run of the upper stage we were only 0.3-sigma away from prediction which is basically Fergwenar. So it has plenty of propellant to take the transpos rejection. Assuming that fuel doesn't freeze and the oxygen doesn't boil and the electronics don't get bright. Those issues we'll find out in a few hours if that that was successful. I don't think there's anything else I know that's worth mentioning. I went out to the landing zone, took a look at the side boosters. They look in really good condition so they're both reflyable although as I said they're combination of version three and version four. So we're only going to be replying really version five at this point that launches shortly and that will be our mainstay. We'll stick to version five for the Falcon architecture. We don't expect to have a version 6. All right, any questions that I haven't answered? I'll do my best to answer them but not sure if I have the information yet but I'll try.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
So we're going to start in the room and the first question goes to David Curley from ABC News.
Reporter
Elon Spectacular. What did you learn? What did Falcon Heavy teach you?
Elon Musk
Teachers I guess told me like crazy things can come true because I'd say like I didn't really think this would work. When I see the rocky lift off I see like a thousand things that could not work and it's amazing when they do. And I was really seeing the two boosters land synchronized really just like the simulation. I mean it makes me think like really that could be quite a scalable approach. You know you could imagine large numbers of those just coming in, landing, taking off, landing, doing many flights per day. So I think it gives me a lot of faith for our next architecture. The sort of the interplanetary spaceship can have different names for it, but BFR is kind of the code name. And it gives me confidence that VFR is really quite workable. I was actually looking at the side boosters and, like, they're pretty big, you know, 16 stories tall, 60 foot leg span, but really we need to be way bigger than that. So I think it's given me a lot of confidence that we can make the BFR design work. Yeah, it's. I have tremendous confidence, obviously, in the SpaceX team. So I think we can really do this a lot and keep advancing the technology to achieve full and rapid reusability, which would have a profound effect on the future. And one of the interesting things about, say, Falcon Heavy versus Falcon 9 is that Falcon Heavy has the same level of expandability as Falcon 9. So if you look to say that the price of Falcon 9 is $60 million, Falcon Heavy is 90, even though it's got three times as much capability. Because in both cases, the only thing that's expended is the upper stage. We're going to start recovering the fairings, the big nose cone. We're going to recover that, recover the boosters. And so there's really, the cost difference really, between a Falcon 9 and a Falcon Heavy is minor.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
The next question from Marcia Dunn at Associated Press.
Reporter
Marsha Nap, what were your, what was going through your mind? How, how amazed were you to see your roadster up there with Starman just cruising along with the blue planet? And how long will we be getting live views, do you think, from the car?
Elon Musk
Well, I think it looks so ridiculous and impossible and you can tell it's real because it looks so fake. Honestly, we have way better CGI if it looks fake. And, you know, the colors all look kind of weird in space. There's no atmospheric occlusion, you know, like, everything was too crisp and. But we know we didn't really test any of those materials for, you know, is its space hardened or whatever, you know, so it just has the same seats that like a normal car has. It's just literally a normal car in space, which I kind of like the absurdity of that. And if you look closely, there's on the dashboard, there's a tiny roadster with a tiny spaceman. So Hot Wheels made a Hot Wheels roadster and a friend of mine suggested, hey, why don't you put that Hot Wheels roadster with a tiny space fan on it, you know, in the car too? Like, that'd be cool. Sure. So we did that. I mean, it's kind of silly and fun. But I think that's, you know, silly. Fun things are important. And normally for new rockets, you know, they'd launch like a block of concrete or something like that. I mean, that's so boring. And I think that's just the imagery of it is something that's going to get people excited around the world. And it's still tripping me out. I mean, I'm tripping balls here, Nick.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
Next question in the room, how about Brendan Byrne from wmfe, the NPR facility in Orlando?
Reporter
Yeah, Congratulations, Elon. Great launch today. Where do you see the Falcon Heavy fitting into this launch industry? Is this something that is going to be for more national security? You see this for interplanetary missions. What's the future of Falcon Heavy?
Elon Musk
Yeah, the great thing is Falcon Heavy opens up a new class of payload so it can launch more than twice as much payload as any other rocket in the world. So it's kind of up to customers what they might want to launch. But it can launch things direct to Pluto and beyond, you know, no stop needed. They don't even need like a gravity assist or anything and launch giant satellites. But I wouldn't recommend and say, hey, we can do bigger and better, which is great. We want a new space race. Raises are exciting.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
How about one more in the room? How about Darryl Neal from the Fox affiliate here in Orlando? Mr. Moss, kind of talk us through your thought process. As you were watching the launch, you
Reporter
said you were incredibly concerned about it.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
Just, you know, just wanted to clear
Reporter
the pad because it kind of.
John Taylor (SpaceX)
I set expectations low. So talk me through as you were watching it.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I think this is true of anyone who's involved in.